[pamelafox]

This is something we've been thinking a lot about while working on the Khan Academy programming curriculum. We want the lessons and challenges to be fun, and to actually product something that the user can identify with (very often, an animal or food :-), but we also don't want to sacrifice teaching the concept in a clear way. For example, today we debated how to do our intro to loops tutorial, and we found that the clearest example wasn't nearly as fun as other possible ones - but it was the most clear, and for something like loops, we want to be really really clear when the student is first wrapping their head around it. We've written up some of our teaching thoughts here, but I'm sure we'll keep evolving them as we learn from our learners: http://cs-blog.khanacademy.org/2013/08/our-design-guidelines...

Thanks for sharing your experience!

[drumsrgr8forn8]

Thanks for commenting. I would definitely say clarity comes before whimsy. That was part of my frustration back in college was the complete lack of clarity. Recursion was taught in about five minutes like this: "A recursive function is a function that calls itself until it reaches a terminating condition..." and then it was never explained again. No one got the recursion questions right on the end of unit quiz except the kids who had been programming since they were young. It wasn't until about 5 years later that I finally wrapped my head around recursion myself.

I really appreciate your comment. Education is really important to me and Kahn Academy has been a huge inspiration to me.

[jclos]

I understand and agree with your point, but not so much with your example. Recursion strikes me as a concept that is simple to explain (and the definition you gave is actually quite good) and hard to master, as in it really sets in when you practice it enough. I think the fault in how you were taught is not in the lack of clarity but that you should have been given a shitload of exercises on the topic.

[drumsrgr8forn8]

Yeah fair enough. I wasn't really critiquing the explanation so much as that was the end of it. They also made us hand write assignments and quizzes thinking it would somehow keep us from cheating. It's been several years now so I wouldn't be able to accurately remember but I _feel_ like most of what we did with recursion from that point on was on paper and we were pretty much left to our own devices to figure out recursion...